The Constant Gardener

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

His face had darkened, its lines deepened. The white light of the huge Saskatchewan sky could not penetrate its shadows. The little town was a lost city, three hours' rail ride out of Winnipeg in the middle of a thousand-mile snowfield, and Justin walked in it determinedly, avoiding the gaze of rare passersby. The constant wind from the Yukon or the high Arctic that all year round whipped across the flat prairie, icing the snow, bending the wheat, buffeting street signs and overhead wires, raised no points of color on his hollowed cheeks. The freezing cold-twenty and more below zero — only spurred his aching body forward. In Winnipeg before he took the train here, he had bought a quilted jacket, a fur cap and gloves. The fury in him was a thorn. A rectangle of plain typing paper nestled in his wallet: GO HOME NOW AND KEEP QUIET OR YOU JOIN YOUR WIFE.

* * *

But it was his wife who had got him here. She had worked his hands free, untied his hood. She had raised him to his knees at the bedside and by stages helped him to the bathroom. Cheered on by her, he had hauled himself to a standing stoop with the aid of the bathtub, had turned on the shower tap and hosed down his face and shirtfront and the collar of his jacket, because he knew — she warned him — that if he undressed he would not be able to dress himself again. His shirtfront was filthy, his jacket was smeared with vomit but he managed to mop them fairly clean. He wanted to go back to sleep but she wouldn't let him. He tried to brush his hair but his arms wouldn't go that high. He had a twenty-four-hour stubble but it must stay there. Standing made his head swim and he was lucky to reach the bed before he toppled over. But it was on her advice that, lying in a seductive half swoon, he refused to pick up the telephone to the concierge or invoke the medical skills of Dr. Birgit. Trust nobody, Tessa told him, so he didn't. He waited till his world had righted itself, then stood up again and reeled across the room, grateful for its miserable size.

He had laid his raincoat over a chair. It was still there. To his surprise so was Birgit's envelope. He opened the wardrobe. The wall safe was built into the back of it, its door closed. He tapped out the date of his wedding day, almost fainting from the pain each time he prodded. The door popped open to reveal Peter Atkinson's passport slumbering peacefully inside. His hands battered but seemingly unbroken, he coaxed the passport out and fed it into his inside jacket pocket. He fought his way into his raincoat and contrived to button it at the neck, then at the waist. Determined to travel light, he possessed only a shoulder bag. His money was still inside it. He collected his shaving things from the bathroom and his shirts and underclothes from the chest of drawers and dropped them into it. He placed Birgit's envelope on top of them and closed the zip. He eased the strap over his shoulder and yelped like a dog at the pain. His watch said five in the morning and it seemed to be working. He lurched into the corridor and rolled himself along the wall to the lift. In the ground-floor lobby two women in Turkish costume were operating an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner. An elderly night porter dozed behind the reception desk. Somehow Justin gave his room number and asked for his bill. Somehow he got a hand into his hip pocket, detached the notes from their wad and added a fat tip "belatedly for Christmas."

"Mind if I grab one of these?" he asked in a voice he didn't recognize. He was indicating a cluster of doorman's umbrellas that were jammed into a ceramic pot beside the door.

"Many as you like," the old porter said.

The umbrella had a stout ash handle that came up to his hip. With its aid he crossed the empty square to the railway station. Reaching the steps that led up to the concourse he paused for a rest and was puzzled to find the porter at his side. He had thought it was Tessa.

"Can you make it?" the old man asked solicitously.

"Yes."

"Shall I get your ticket?"

Justin turned and offered the old man his pocket. "Zurich," he said. "Single."

"First class?"

"Absolutely."

* * *

Switzerland was a childhood dream. Forty years ago his parents had taken him on a walking holiday in the Engadine and they had stayed in a grand hotel on a spit of forest between two lakes. Nothing had changed. Not the polished parquet or the stained glass or the stern-faced chatelaine who showed him to his room. Reclining on the daybed on his balcony, Justin watched the same lakes glistening in the evening sun, and the same fisherman huddled in his rowing boat in the mist. The days passed uncounted, punctuated by visits to the spa and the death knell of the dinner gong summoning him to solitary meals among whispery old couples. In a side street of old chalets, a pallid doctor and his woman assistant dressed his bruises. "A car smash," Justin explained. The doctor frowned through his spectacles. His young assistant laughed.

By night his interior world reclaimed him, as it had every night since Tessa's death. Tolling at the marquetry desk in the window bay, doggedly writing to Ham with his bruised right hand, following the travails of Markus Lorbeer as retold by Birgit, then gingerly resuming his labor of love to Ham, Justin was conscious of a dawning sense of his own completion. If Lorbeer the penitent was in the desert, purging his guilt with a diet of locusts and wild honey, Justin too was alone with his destiny. But he was resolved. And in some dark sense purified. He had never supposed that his search would have a good end. It had never occurred to him that there could be one. To take up Tessa's mission — to shoulder her banner and put on her courage — was purpose enough for him. She had witnessed a monstrous injustice and gone out to fight it. Too late, he too had witnessed it. Her fight was his.

But when he remembered the eternal night of the black hood and smelled his own vomit, when he surveyed the systematic bruising of his body, the oval imprints of yellow and blue that ran like colored musical notes across his trunk and back and thighs, he experienced a different kind of kinship. I'm one of you. I no longer tend the roses while you murmur over your green tea. You needn't lower your voices as I approach. I'm with you at the table, saying yes.

On the seventh day Justin paid his bill and, almost without telling himself what he was doing, took a post-bus and a train to Basel, to that fabled valley of the upper Rhine where pharmagiants have their castles. And there, from a frescoed palace, he posted a fat envelope to Ham's old dragon in Milan.

Then Justin walked. Painfully, but walked. First up a cobbled hill to the medieval city with its bell towers, merchant houses, statues to free thinkers and martyrs of oppression. And when he had duly reminded himself of this inheritance, as it seemed to him, he retraced his steps to the river's edge, and from a children's playground gazed upward in near disbelief at the ever-spreading concrete kingdom of the pharma-billionaires, at their faceless barracks ranged shoulder to shoulder against the individual enemy. Orange cranes fussed restlessly above them. White chimneys like muted minarets, some checkered at the tip, some striped or dazzle-painted as a warning to aircraft, poured their invisible gases into a brown sky. And at their feet lay whole railways, marshaling yards, lorry parks and wharfs, each protected by its very own Berlin Wall capped with razor wire and daubed with graffiti.

Drawn forward by a force he had ceased to define, Justin crossed the bridge and, as in a dream, wandered a dismal wasteland of run-down housing estates, secondhand clothes shops and hollow-eyed immigrant laborers on bicycles. And gradually, by some accident of magnetic attraction, he found himself standing in what at first appeared to be a pleasant tree-lined avenue at the far end of which stood an ecologically friendly gateway so densely overgrown with creeper that at first you barely spotted the oak doors inside, with their polished brass bell to press, and their brass letter box for mail. It was only when Justin looked up, and farther up, and then right up into the sky above his head that he woke to the immensity of a triptych of white tower blocks linked by flying corridors. The stonework was hospital clean, the windows were of coppered glass. And from somewhere behind each monstrous block rose a white chimney, sharp as a pencil jammed into the sky. And from each chimney the letters KVH, done in gold and mounted vertically down its length, winked at him like old friends.

How long he remained there, alone, trapped like some insect at the triptych's base, he had no notion then or later. Sometimes it seemed to him that the building's wings were closing in to crush him. Sometimes they were toppling down on him. His knees gave way and he discovered he was sitting on a bench, on some bit of beaten ground where cautious women walked their dogs. He noticed a faint but pervasive smell and was for a moment returned to the mortuary in Nairobi. How long do I have to live here, he wondered, before I stop noticing the smell? Evening must have fallen because the coppered windows lightened. He made out moving silhouettes and winking pinpoints of computer blue. Why do I sit here? he asked her as he went on watching. What am I thinking of, except you?

She was sitting beside him, but for once she had no answer ready. I am thinking about your courage, he replied for her. I am thinking, it was you and Arnold against all this, while dear old Justin worried about keeping his flower beds sandy enough to grow your yellow freesias. I am thinking I don't believe in me anymore, and all I stood for. That there was a time when, like the people in this building, your Justin took pride in submitting himself to the harsher judgments of a collective will — which he happened to call Country, or the Doctrine of the Reasonable Man or, with some misgiving, the Higher Cause. There was a time when I believed it was expedient that one man — or woman — should die for the benefit of many. I called it sacrifice, or duty, or necessity. There was a time when I could stand outside the Foreign Office at night and stare up at its lighted windows and think: Good evening, it's me your humble servant, Justin. I'm a piece of the great wise engine, and proud of it. I serve, therefore I feel. Whereas all I feel now is: it was you against the whole pack of them and, unsurprisingly, they won.

* * *

From Main Street of the little town Justin turned left and northwest onto Dawes Boulevard, taking the full blast of the prairie wind on his darkened face as he continued his wary examination of his surroundings. His three years as Economic Attache in Ottawa had not been wasted. Though he had never been here in his life, everything he saw was familiar to him. Snow from Halloween to Easter, he remembered. Plant after the first moon in June and harvest before the first hard frost in September. It would be several weeks yet before scared crocuses started appearing in the tufts of dead grass and on the bald prairie. Across the road from him stood the synagogue, feisty and functional, built by settlers dumped at the railroad station with their bad memories, cardboard suitcases and promises of free land. A hundred yards on rose the Ukrainian church and along from it the Roman Catholics, the Presbyterians, Jehovah's Witnesses and Baptists. Their car parks were got up like electrified horse pens so that the engines of the faithful could be warmed while their owners prayed. A line of Montesquieu drifted through his head: there have never been so many civil wars as in the kingdom of Christ.

Behind the houses of God stood the houses of Mammon, the industrial sector of the town. Beef prices must be through the floor, he reckoned. Why else would he be looking at Guy Poitier's spanking-new Delectable Porkmeat factory? And grain was faring no better by the looks of things — or what was a Sunflower Seed Pressing Company doing in the middle of a wheat field? And that cluster of timid folk standing around the old tenements down in the station square, they must be Sioux or Cree. The towpath turned a bend and led him north through a short tunnel. He emerged in a different country of boathouses and mansions with river frontage. This is where the rich Anglos mow their lawns and wash their cars and varnish their boats and fume about the Yids, the Ukies and those darned Indians on welfare, he decided. And up there on the hill, or as near to a hill as you get round here, stood his goal, the pride of the town, the jewel of eastern Saskatchewan, its academic Camelot, Dawes University, an organized medley of medieval sandstone, colonial redbrick and glass domes. Reaching a fork in the towpath, Justin scaled the short rise and by way of a 1920's Ponte Vecchio arrived at a crenellated gatehouse surmounted with a gilded coat of arms. Through its archway he was able to admire the immaculate medieval campus and its bronze founder, George Eamon Dawes Jr. himself, mine owner, railroad baron, lecher, land thief, Indian shooter and local saint resplendent on a granite plinth.

He kept walking. He had studied the handbook. The road widened and became a parade ground. The wind threw up grainy dust from the tarmac. On the far side of it stood an ivyclad pavilion and, enfolding it, three purpose-built blocks of steel and concrete. Long neon-lit windows sliced them into layers. A signboard in green and gold — Mrs. Dawes's favorite colors, thus the handbook — proclaimed in French and English the University Hospital for Clinical Research. A lesser sign said Outpatients. Justin followed it and came to a row of swing doors overhung by a curly concrete canopy and watched over by two bulky women in green topcoats. He wished them good evening and received a jolly greeting in return. Face frozen, his beaten body throbbing from the walk, hot snakes running up his thighs and back, he stole a last surreptitious glance behind him and strode up the steps.

The lobby was high and marbled and funereal. A large, awful portrait of George Eamon Dawes Jr. in hunting gear reminded him of the entrance hall of the Foreign Office. A reception desk, staffed by silver-haired men and women in green tunics, ran along one wall. In a moment they're going to call me "Mr. Quayle, sir" and tell me Tessa was a fine, fine lady. He sauntered down a miniature shopping mall. The Dawes Saskatchewan bank. A post office. A Dawes newsstand. McDonald's, Pizza Paradise, a Starbucks coffee shop, a Dawes boutique selling lingerie, maternity wear and bed jackets. He reached a convergence of corridors filled with the clank and squeak of trolleys, the growl of elevators, the tinny echo of quick heels and the peep of telephones. Apprehensive visitors stood and sat about. Staff in green gowns hurried out of one doorway and back through another. None wore golden bees on his pocket.

A large notice board hung beside a door marked Doctors Only. With his hands linked behind his back in a manner to denote authority, Justin examined the notices. Babysitters, boats and cars, wanted and on offer. Rooms to rent. The Dawes Glee Club, the Dawes Bible Study Class, the Dawes Ethics Society, the Dawes Scottish Reel and Eightsome Group. An anesthetist is looking for a good brown dog of medium height not less than three years old, "must be an ace hiker." Dawes Loan Schemes, Dawes Deferred Payment Study Schemes. A service in the Dawes Memorial Chapel to give thanks for the life of Dr. Maria Kowalski — does anyone know what sort of music she used to like, if any? Rosters for Doctors on Call, Doctors on Vacation, Doctors on Duty. And a jolly poster announcing that this week's free pizzas for medical students arrive with compliments of Karel Vita Hudson of Vancouver — and why not come to our KVH Sunday Brunch and Film Show at the Haybarn Disco too? Just fill in the Please Invite Me form available with your pizza and get a free ticket to a lifetime's experience!

But of Dr. Lara Emrich, until recently the leading light of the Dawes academic staff, expert on multi- and nonresistant strains of tuberculosis, sometime KVH'-SPONSORED Dawes research professor and codiscoverer of the wonder drug Dypraxa, there was not a word. She wasn't going on vacation, she wasn't on call. Her name wasn't included in the glossy internal telephone directory hanging by a tasseled green cord at the notice board's side. She was not in search of a male brown dog of middle height. The one reference to her, perhaps, was a handwritten postcard, relegated to the bottom of the notice board and almost out of sight, regretting that "on the Dean's orders" the scheduled meeting of Saskatchewan Doctors for Integrity would not be taking place on Dawes University premises. A new venue would be announced a.s.a.p.

* * *

His body screaming blue murder from cold and exertion, Justin relents sufficiently to take a cab back to his characterless motel. He has been clever this time. Borrowing a leaf from Lesley's book he has sent his letter by way of a florist, together with a generous bunch of lover's roses.

I am an English journalist and a friend of Birgit at Hippo. I am investigating the death of Tessa Quayle. Please could you telephone me at the Saskatchewan Man Motel, room 18, after seven this evening. I suggest you use a public call box a good distance from your home.

Peter Atkinson

Tell her who I am later, he had reasoned. Don't scare her. Pick the time and place. Wiser. His cover was wearing thin but it was the only cover he had. He had been Atkinson at his German hotel and Atkinson when they beat him up. But they had addressed him as Mr. Quayle. As Atkinson nonetheless he had flown from Zurich to Toronto, gone to earth in a brick boarding house close to the railway station and, with a surreal sense of detachment, learned from his little radio of the worldwide manhunt for Dr. Arnold Bluhm, wanted in connection with the murder of Tessa Quayle. I'm an Oswald man, Justin… Arnold Bluhm lost his rag and killed Tessa… And it was as nobody at all that he had boarded the train to Winnipeg, waited a day, then boarded another to this little town. All the same he wasn't fooling himself. At best, he had a few days' march on them. But in a civilized country you could never tell.

* * *

"Peter?"

Justin woke abruptly and glanced at his watch. Nine at night. He had set a pen and notebook beside the telephone.

"This is Peter."

"I am Lara." It was a complaint.

"Hullo, Lara. Where can we meet?"

A sigh. A forlorn, terminally tired sigh to match the forlorn Slav voice. "It is not possible."

"Why not?"

"There is a car outside my house. Sometimes they put a van. They watch and listen all the time. To meet discreetly is not possible."

"Where are you now?"

"In a telephone kiosk." She made it sound as if she would never get out of it alive.

"Is anybody watching you now?"

"Nobody is visible. But it is night. Thank you for the roses."

"I can meet you wherever suits you. At a friend's house. Out in the country somewhere, if you prefer."

"You have a car?"

"No."

"Why not?" It was a rebuke and a challenge.

"I don't have the right documents with me."

"Who are you?"

"I told you. A friend of Birgit's. A British journalist. We can talk more about that when we meet."

She had rung off. His stomach was turning and he needed the lavatory, but the bathroom contained no telephone extension. He waited till he could wait no longer and scurried to the bathroom. With his trousers round his ankles he heard the phone ringing. It rang three times but by the time he had hobbled to it, it was dead. Head in hands he sat on the edge of the bed. I'm no bloody good at this. What would the spies do? What would crafty old Donohue do? With an Ibsen heroine on the line, the same as I'm doing now and probably worse. He checked his watch again, fearing he had lost his sense of time. He took it off and set it beside his pen and notepad. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Thirty. What the hell's happened to her? He put his watch back on, losing his temper while he tried to get the damned strap home.

"Peter?"

"Where can we meet? Anywhere you say."

"Birgit says you are her husband."

Oh God. Oh earth stand still. Oh Jesus.

"Birgit said that on the telephone?"

"She did not mention names. "He is her husband." That is all. She was discreet. Why did you not tell me you are her husband? Then I would not think you were a provocation."

"I was going to tell you when we met."

"I will telephone to my friend. You should not send me roses. It is exaggerated."

"What friend? Lara, be careful what you say to her. My name's Peter Atkinson. I'm a journalist. Are you still in the phone box?"

"Yes."

"The same one?"

"I am not observed. In winter they observe only from cars. They are lazy. No car is visible."

"Have you got enough coins?"

"I have a card."

"Use coins. Don't use a card. Did you use a card when you called Birgit?"

"It is not important."

It was half past ten before she called again. "My friend is assisting at an operation," she explained without apology. "The operation is complicated. I have another friend. She is willing. If you are afraid, take a taxi to Eaton's and walk the remaining distance."

"I'm not afraid. I'm prudent."

For God's sake, he thought, writing down the address. We haven't met, I've sent her two dozen exaggerated roses and we're having a lovers' tiff.

* * *

There were two ways to leave his motel: by the front door and one step down to the car park, or by the back door to the corridor that led, by a warren of other corridors, to reception. Switching out the lights in his room, Justin peered through the window at the car park. Under a full moon each parked car wore a silver halo of frost. Of the twenty-odd in the car park, only one was occupied. A woman sat in the driving seat. Her front passenger was a man. They were arguing. About roses? Or about the god Profit? The woman gesticulated, the man shook his head. The man got out and barked a final word at her, a curse, slammed the door, got into another car and drove away. The woman remained where she was. She lifted her hands in despair and drove them onto the top of the steering wheel, knuckles upward. She bowed her head into her hands and wept, shoulders heaving. Overcoming an absurd desire to comfort her, Justin hastened to the reception desk and ordered a cab.

* * *

The house was one of a terrace of new white town houses built in a Victorian street. Each house was set at an angle, like a line of ships' prows nosing their way into an old harbor. Each had a basement with its own stairway, and a front door set above street level, and stone steps leading up to it, and iron railings, and brass horseshoes for door knockers that didn't knock. Watched by a fat gray cat that had made itself at home between the curtains and the window of number seven, Justin climbed the steps of number six and pressed the bell. He was carrying everything he possessed: one travel bag, money and, despite Lesley's injunction not to do so, both his passports. He had paid the motel in advance. If he returned to it, he would do so of his own free will and not because he needed to. It was ten o'clock of a frosted, freezing, ice-clear night. Cars were parked nose to tail along the curb, pavements empty. The door was opened by a tall woman in silhouette.

"You are Peter," she told him accusingly.

"Are you Lara?"

"Naturally."

She closed the door after him.

"Were you followed here?" he asked her.

"It is possible. Were you?"

They faced each other under the light. Birgit was right: Lara Emrich was beautiful. Beautiful in the haughty intelligence of her stare. In its chill, scientific detachment that, already at first scenting, caused him inwardly to recoil. In the way she shoved her graying hair aside with the back of her wrist; then, with her elbow still raised and her wrist at her brow, continued critically to survey him with an arrogant yet inconsolable stare. She wore black. Black slacks, a long black smock, no makeup. The voice, heard close, even gloomier than on the telephone.

"I am very sorry for you," she said. "It is terrible. You are sad."

"Thank you."

"She was murdered by Dypraxa."

"So I believe. Indirectly, but yes."

"Many people have been murdered by Dypraxa."

"But not all of them were betrayed by Markus Lorbeer."

From upstairs came a roar of televised applause.

"Amy is my friend," she said, as if friendship were an affliction. "Today she is a registrar at Dawes Hospital. But unfortunately she signed a petition favoring my reinstatement and is a founding member of Saskatchewan Doctors for Integrity. Therefore they will be looking for an excuse to fire her."

He was going to ask her whether Amy knew him as Quayle or Atkinson when a strong-voiced woman bawled down at them and a pair of furry slippers appeared on the top stair.

"Bring him on up here, Lara. Man needs a drink."

Amy was middle-aged and fat, one of those serious women who have decided to play themselves as comedy. She wore a crimson silk kimono and pirate's earrings. Her slippers had glass eyes. But her own eyes were ringed with shadow, and there were pain lines at the corners of her mouth.

"Men who killed your wife should be hanged," she said. "Scotch, bourbon or wine? This is Ralph."

It was a large attic room, lined in pine and roof high. At the far end stood a bar. A huge television set was playing ice hockey. Ralph was a wispy-haired old man in a dressing gown. He sat in an imitation leather armchair with a matching stool to put his slippered feet on. Hearing his name, he flapped a liver-spotted hand in the air but kept his eyes on the game.

"Welcome to Saskatchewan. Grab yourself a drink," he called, in a mid-European accent.

"Who's winning?" Justin asked, to be friendly.

"Canucks."

"Ralph's a lawyer," Amy said. "Aren't you, honey?"

"Not much of anything now. Damned Parkinson's dragging me into the grave. That academic body behaved like a bunch of horses' arses. That what you came about?"

"Pretty much."

"Stifle free speech, interpose yourself between doctor and patient, it's time educated men and women had some balls to speak out for truth instead of cringing in the shithouse like a bunch of craven cowards."

"It is indeed," said Justin politely, accepting a glass of white wine from Amy.

"Karel Vita's the piper, Dawes dances to their tune. Twenty-five million dollars start-up money they give for a new biotech building, fifty more promised. That's not peanuts, even for a shower of rich no-brains like Karel Vita. And if everybody keeps their nose clean, plenty more to come. How the hell d'you resist pressure like that?"

"You try," Amy said. "If you don't try, you're fucked."

"Fucked if you try, fucked if you don't. Speak out, they take away your salary, fire you and run you out of town. Free speech comes mighty costly in this town, Mr. Quayle — more than most of us can afford. What's your other name?"

"Justin."

"This is a one-crop city, Justin, when it comes to free speech. Everything's fine and dandy, long as some crazy Russian bitch doesn't take it into her head to publish harebrained articles in the medical press badmouthing a clever little pill she's invented that happens to be worth a couple of billion a year to the House of Karel Vita, whom Allah preserve. Where you planning to put them, Amy?"

"In the den."

"Mind you switch the phones over so's they don't get disturbed. Amy's the technical one round here, Justin. I'm the old fart. Anything you want, have Lara fix it for you. Knows the house better than we do, which is a waste, seeing as we're gonna be thrown out of it in a couple of months."

He went back to his victorious Canucks.

* * *

She no longer sees him, though she has put on heavy spectacles that should have been a man's. The Russian in her has brought a "perhaps" bag and it lies mouth open at her feet, stuffed with papers that she knows by heart: lawyers' letters threatening her, faculty letters dismissing her, a copy of her unpublishable article, and finally her own lawyer's letters, but not too many of them because, as she explains, she has no money and besides, her lawyer is more comfortable defending the rights of the Sioux than doing battle with the limitless legal resources of Messrs. Karel Vita Hudson of Vancouver. They sit like chess players without a board, square to each other, knees almost touching. A memory of Oriental postings tells Justin not to point his feet at her, so he sits askew, at some discomfort to his battered body. For a while now she has talked into the shadows past his shoulder and he has barely interrupted her. Her self-absorption is absolute, her voice by turn despondent and didactic. She lives only with the monstrosity of her case and its hopeless insolubility. Everything is a reference to it. Sometimes — quite often, he suspects — she forgets him entirely. Or he is something else for her — a hesitant faculty meeting, a timid convocation of university colleagues, a vacillating professor, an inadequate lawyer. It is only when he speaks Lorbeer's name that she wakes to him and frowns — then offers some mystical generality that is a palpable evasion: Markus is too romantic, he is so weak, all men do bad things, women also. And no, she does not know where to find him:

"He is hiding somewhere. He is erratic, each morning a different direction," she explains with unrelenting melancholy.

"If he says the desert, is it a real desert?"

"It will be a place of great inconvenience. That also is typical."

To plead her cause she has absorbed phrases that he would not have credited her with: "I will fast-forward here… KVH are taking no prisoners." She even speaks of "my patients on death row." And when she presses a lawyer's letter on him, she quotes from it while he reads it, lest he miss the most offensive parts:

You are again reminded that under the confidentiality clause in your contract you are expressly forbidden to impart this misinformation to your patients… You are formally warned against any further dissemination, verbally or by any other means, of these inaccurate and malicious opinions based on the false interpretation of data obtained while you were under contract to Messrs. Karel Vita Hudson…

This is followed by the superbly arrogant non sequitur that "our clients deny absolutely that at any time did they attempt in any way to suppress or influence legitimate scientific debate…"

"But why did you sign the wretched contract in the first place?" Justin cuts in roughly.

Pleased by his animus she gives a mirthless laugh. "Because I trusted them. I was a fool."

"You're anything but a fool, Lara! You're a highly intelligent woman, for God's sake," Justin exclaims.

Insulted, she lapses into a brooding silence.

* * *

The first couple of years after Karel Vita acquired the Emrich-Kovacs molecule through the agency of Markus Lorbeer, she tells him, were a golden age. Initial short-term tests were excellent, the statistics made them better, the Emrich-Kovacs partnership was the talk of the scientific community. KVH provided dedicated research laboratories, a team of technicians, clinical trials all over the Third World, first-class travel, glamorous hotels, respect and money galore.

"For frivolous Kovacs, it was her dream come true. She will drive Rolls-Royces, she will win Nobel Prizes, she will be famous and rich, she will have many, many lovers. And for serious Lara, the clinical trials will be scientific, they will be responsible. They will test the drug in a wide range of ethnic and social communities that are vulnerable to the disease. Many lives will be improved, others will be saved. That will be very satisfactory."

"And for Lorbeer?"

An irritable glance, a grimace of disapproval.

"Markus wishes to be a rich saint. He is for Rolls-Royces, also for saved lives."

"For God and Profit, then," Justin suggests lightly, but her only response is another scowl.

"After two years I was making an unfortunate discovery. The KVH trials were bullshit. They had not been scientifically written. They were designed only to get the drug onto the market as soon as possible. Certain side effects were deliberately excluded. If side effects were identified, the trial was immediately rewritten so that they did not reappear."

"What were the side effects?"

Her lecture-room voice again, mordant and arrogant. "At the time of the unscientific trials, few side effects were observed. This was due also to the excessive enthusiasm of Kovacs and Lorbeer, and the determination of clinics and medical centers in Third World countries to make the trials look good. Also the trials were being favorably reported in important medical journals by distinguished opinion leaders who did not declare their profitable connections with KVH. In reality such articles were written in Vancouver or Basel and only signed by the distinguished opinion leaders. It was remarked that the drug did not suit an insignificant proportion of women of childbearing age. Some had blurred vision. There were some deaths, but an unscientific manipulation of dates ensured that they were not included in the period under review."

"Did nobody complain?"

The question angers her. "Who shall complain? Third World doctors and medical workers who are making money from the trials? The distributor who is making money from marketing the drug and does not wish to lose the profits from the whole range of KVH drugs — maybe lose their entire business?"

"How about the patients?"

Her opinion of him has reached rock bottom. "Most of the patients are in undemocratic countries with very corrupt systems. Theoretically they gave their informed consent to the treatment. That is to say, their signatures are on the consent forms even if they cannot read what they have signed. They are not allowed by law to be paid, but they are generously recompensed for their travel and loss of earnings and they have free food, which they like very much. Also they are afraid."

"Of the pharmas?"

"Of everybody. If they complain they are threatened. They are told their children will receive no more medicines from America and their men will go to prison."

"But you complained."

"No. I did not complain. I protested. Vigorously. When I discovered that Dypraxa was being promoted as a safe drug and not as a drug on trial, I gave a lecture at a scientific meeting of the university at which I described accurately the unethical position of KVH. This was not popular. Dypraxa is a good drug. That is not the issue. The issue is threefold." Three slender fingers have already gone up. "Issue one: the side effects are being deliberately concealed in the interest of profit. Issue two: the world's poorest communities are used as guinea pigs by the world's richest. Issue three: legitimate scientific debate of these issues is stifled by corporate intimidation."

The fingers are withdrawn while with her other hand she delves in her bag and unearths a glossy blue leaflet with the banner headline GOOD NEWS FROM KVH.

DYPRAXA is a highly effective, safe, economic substitute for the hitherto accepted treatments of tuberculosis. It has proved itself to be of outstanding advantage to emerging nations.

She takes back the leaflet and replaces it with a much-thumbed solicitor's letter. One paragraph is highlighted.

The study of Dypraxa was designed and implemented in an entirely ethical manner over a number of years with the informed consent of all patients. KVH does not distinguish in its trials between rich and poor countries. it is solely concerned to select conditions appropriate to the project in hand. KVH are rightly praised for their high quality of care.

"Where is Kovacs in this?"

"Kovacs is totally on the side of the corporation. She is without integrity. It is with the assistance of Kovacs that much of the clinical data is distorted or suppressed."

"And Lorbeer?"

"Markus is divided. This is normal to him. In his self-perception he has become chief of all Africa for Dypraxa. But he is also frightened and ashamed. Therefore he confesses."

"Employed by ThreeBees or KVH?"

"If it is Markus, maybe both. He is complicated."

"So how on earth does KVH come to set you up at Dawes?"

"Because I was a fool," Lara repeats proudly, putting to rest his earlier assertion to the contrary. "Why would I accept to sign unless I was a fool? KVH were very polite, very charming, very understanding, very clever. I was in Basel when two young men came from Vancouver to see me. I was flattered. Like you, they sent me roses. I told them the trials were shit. They agreed. I told them they should not be selling Dypraxa as a safe drug. They agreed. I told them that many side effects had never been properly assessed. They admired me for my courage. One of them was a Russian from Novgorod. "Come to lunch, Lara. Let's talk this thing through." Then they told me they would like to bring me to Dawes to design my own trial of Dypraxa. They were reasonable, unlike their superiors. They accepted that we had not made enough correct tests. Now at Dawes we would make them. It was my drug. I was proud of it, they also. The university was proud. We made a harmonious arrangement. Dawes would welcome me, KVH would pay for me. Dawes is ideally located for such trials. We have native Indians from the reservations who are susceptible to old tuberculosis. We have multi-resistant cases from the hippy community in Vancouver. For Dypraxa, this is a perfect combination. It was on the basis of this arrangement that I signed the contract and accepted the confidentiality clause. I was a fool," she repeated, with the sniff that says "case proven."

"And KVH has offices in Vancouver."

"Big offices. Their third-biggest facility in the world after Basel and Seattle. So they could watch me. Which was the object. To put a muzzle on me and to control me. I signed the stupid contract and went to work with a good heart. Last year I completed my study. It was extremely negative. I felt it necessary to inform my patients of my opinion concerning the potential side effects of Dypraxa. As a doctor, I have a sacred duty. I also concluded that the world medical community must be informed by means of publication in an important journal. Such journals do not like to print negative opinions. I knew this. I knew also that the journal would invite three distinguished scientists to comment on my findings. What the journal did not know was that the distinguished scientists had just signed rich contracts with KVH Seattle to research biotechnical cures for other diseases. They immediately informed Seattle of my intentions, who informed Basel and Vancouver."

She hands him a folded sheet of white paper. He opens it and has a chilling sense of recognition.

COMMUNIST WHORE. GET YOUR SHITCOVERED HANDS OFF OUR UNIVERSITY. GO BACK TO YOUR BOLSHEVIK PIGSTY. STOP POISONING DECENT PEOPLE'S LIVES WITH YOUR CORRUPT THEORIES.

Large electronic capitals. No spelling mistakes. The familiar use of compounds. Join the club, he thinks.

"It is arranged that Dawes University will participate in the worldwide profits of Dypraxa," she continues, carelessly snatching the letter back from him. "Staff who are loyal to the hospital will receive preferential shares. Those who are not loyal receive such anonymous letters. It is more important to be loyal to the hospital than loyal to the patients. It is most important to be loyal to KVH."

"Halliday wrote it," Amy says, sweeping into the room with a tray of coffee and biscuits. "Halliday's the preeminent bull dyke of the Dawes medical mafia. Everybody in the faculty has to kiss her ass or die. Except me and Lara and a couple of other idiots."

"How d'you know she wrote it?" Justin asks.

"DNA'd the cow. Picked the stamp off the envelope, DNA'd her spit. She likes to work out in the hospital gym. Me and Lara stole a hair from her pink Bambi hairbrush and made the match."

"Did anyone confront her?"

"Sure. The whole board. Cow confessed. Excess of zeal in execution of her duties, which consist solely of protecting the university's best interests. Humbly apologized, pleaded emotional stress, which is her word for salivating sexual envy. Case dismissed, cow congratulated. Meanwhile they trashed Lara. I'm next."

"Emrich is a Communist," Lara explains, relishing the irony. "She is Russian, she grew up in Petersburg when it was Leningrad, she attended Soviet colleges, therefore she is a Communist and anticorporate. It is convenient."

"Emrich didn't invent Dypraxa either, did you, honey?" Amy reminds her.

"It was Kovacs," Lara agrees bitterly. "Kovacs was the complete genius. I was her promiscuous laboratory assistant. Lorbeer was my lover, therefore he claimed the glory for me."

"Which is why they're not paying you any more money, OK, honey?"

"No. It is a different reason. I have broken the confidentiality clause, therefore I have broken my contract. It is logical."

"Lara's a prostitute too, aren't you, honey? Screwed the pretty boys they sent her from Vancouver, except she didn't. Nobody at Dawes fucks. And we're all Christians except the Jews."

"Since the drug is killing patients I would wish very much that I had not invented it," says Lara softly, choosing not to hear Amy's parting sally.

"When did you last see Lorbeer?" Justin asks when they are alone again.

* * *

Her tone still guarded, but softer.

"He was in Africa," she said.

"When?"

"One year ago."

"Less than a year," Justin corrected her. "My wife spoke to him in the Uhuru Hospital six months ago. His apologia, or whatever he calls it, was sent from Nairobi several days ago. Where is he now?"

Being corrected was not what Lara Emrich liked. "You asked me when I last saw him," she retorted, bridling. "It was one year ago. In Africa."

"Where in Africa?"

"In Kenya. He sent for me. The accumulation of evidence had become unbearable to him. "Lara, I need you. It is essential and very urgent. Tell nobody. I will pay. Come." I was affected by his appeal. I told Dawes my mother was ill and flew to Nairobi. I arrived on a Friday. Markus met me at Nairobi airport. Already in the car he asked me: "Lara, is it possible that our drug is increasing pressure on the brain, crushing the optic nerve?"' I reminded him that anything was possible since basic scientific data had not been assembled, although we were attempting to remedy this. He drove me to a village and showed me a woman who could not stand up. Her headaches were terrible. She was dying. He drove me to another village where a woman could not focus her eyes. When she went out of her hut the world went dark. He related other cases to me. The health workers were reluctant to speak frankly to us. They too were afraid. ThreeBees punishes all criticism, Markus says. He also was afraid. Afraid of ThreeBees, afraid of KVH, afraid for the sick women, afraid of God. "What shall I do, Lara, what shall I do?"' He has spoken to Kovacs, who is in Basel. She says he is a fool to panic. These are not the side effects of Dypraxa, she says, they are the effects of a bad combination with another drug. This is typical Kovacs, who has married a rich Serbian crook and spends more time at the opera than in the laboratory."

"So what should he do?"

"I told him what was the truth. What he is observing in Africa is what I am observing in the Dawes Hospital in Saskatchewan. "Markus, these are the same side effects that I am documenting in my report to Vancouver, based on objective clinical trials of six hundred cases." Still he cries to me, "What must I do, Lara, what must I do?"' "Markus," I tell him. "You must be courageous, you must do unilaterally what the corporations refuse to do collectively, you must withdraw the drug from the market until it has been exhaustively tested." He wept. It was our last night together as lovers. I also wept."

* * *

Some savage instinct now took hold of Justin, a root resentment he could not define. Did he grudge this woman her survival? Did he resent it that she had slept with Tessa's self-confessed betrayer and even now spoke tenderly about him? Was he offended that she could sit before him, beautiful and alive and self-obsessed, while Tessa lay dead beside their son? Was he insulted that Lara displayed so little concern for Tessa, and so much for herself?

"Did Lorbeer ever mention Tessa to you?"

"Not at the time of my visit."

"So when?"

"He wrote to me that there was a woman, the wife of a British official, who was putting pressure on ThreeBees regarding Dypraxa, writing letters and making unwelcome visits. This woman was supported by a doctor from one of the aid agencies. He did not mention the doctor's name."

"When did he write this?"

"On my birthday. Markus remembers always my birthday. He congratulated me on my birthday and told me of a British woman and her lover the African doctor."

"Did he suggest what should be done with them?"

"He feared for her. He said she was beautiful and very tragic. I think he was attracted to her."

Justin was assailed by the extraordinary notion that Lara was jealous of Tessa.

"And the doctor?"

"Markus admires all doctors."

"Where did he write from?"

"Cape Town. He was examining the ThreeBees operation in South Africa, privately making comparisons with his experiences in Kenya. He was respectful of your wife. Courage does not come easily to Markus. It must be learned."

"Did he say where he'd met her?"

"At the hospital in Nairobi. She had challenged him. He was embarrassed."

"Why?"

"He was obliged to ignore her. Markus believes that if he ignores somebody he will make them unhappy, especially if they are a woman."

"Nevertheless he managed to betray her."

"Markus is not always practical. He is an artist. If he says he betrayed her, that can also be figurative."

"Did you reply to his letter?"

"Always."

"Where to?"

"It was a box number in Nairobi."

"Did he mention a woman called Wanza? She shared a ward with my wife in the Uhuru Hospital. She died of Dypraxa."

"The case is not known to me."

"I'm not surprised. All traces of her were removed."

"It is predictable. Markus told me of such things."

"When Lorbeer visited my wife's ward, he was accompanied by Kovacs. What was Kovacs doing in Nairobi?"

"Markus wanted me to come to Nairobi a second time but my relationship with KVH and the hospital was by this time bad. They had heard about my earlier visit and were already threatening to have me expelled from the university because I lied about my mother. Therefore Markus telephoned to Kovacs in Basel and persuaded her to come to Nairobi as my substitute and observe the situation with him. He was hoping she would spare him the difficult decision and herself advise ThreeBees to withdraw the drug. KVH in Basel was at first reluctant to allow Kovacs to go to Nairobi, then they consented on condition that the visit remained a secret."

"Even from ThreeBees?"

"From ThreeBees that would not have been possible. ThreeBees were too close to the situation and Markus was advising them. Kovacs visited Nairobi for four days in great secrecy, then returned to her Serbian crook in Basel for more opera."

"Did she file a report?"

"It was a contemptible report. I was educated as a scientist. This was not science. This was polemic."

"Lara."

"What is it?" She was staring combatively at him.

"Birgit read you Lorbeer's letter over the telephone. His apologia. His confession. His whatever he calls it."

"So?"

"What did it mean to you — the letter?"

"That Markus cannot be redeemed."

"From what?"

"He is a weak man who looks for strength in the wrong places. Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong. Maybe he did something very bad. Sometimes he is too much in love with his own sins."

"If you had to find him, where would you look for him?"

"I do not have to find him." He waited. "I have only a postbox number in Nairobi."

"May I have it?"

Her depression had reached new depths. "I will write it for you." She wrote on a pad, tore off the sheet and gave it him. "If I was looking for him, I would look among those that he has injured," she said.

"In the desert."

"Maybe it is figurative." The aggressive edge had left her voice, as it had left Justin's. "Markus is a child," she explained simply. "He acts from impulse and reacts to the consequences." She actually smiled, and her smile too was beautiful. "Often he is very surprised."

"Who provides the impulse?"

"Once it was me."

He stood up too quickly, meaning to fold the papers she had given him into his pocket. His head swam, he felt nauseous. He thrust a hand to the wall to steady himself, only to discover that the professional doctor had taken his arm.

"What's the matter?" she said sharply, and kept holding him while she sat him down again.

"I just get giddy now and then."

"Why? You have high blood pressure? You should not wear a tie. Undo your collar. You are ridiculous."

She was holding her hand across his brow. He felt weak as an invalid and desperately tired. She left him and returned with a glass of water. He drank some, handed her the glass. Her gestures were assured but tender. He felt her gaze on him.

"You have a fever," she said accusingly.

"Maybe."

"Not maybe. You have a fever. I will drive you to your hotel."

It was the moment that the tiresome instructor had warned him against on his security course, the moment when you are too bored, too lazy or simply too tired to care; when all you can think of is getting back to your lousy motel, going to sleep and, in the morning, when your head has cleared, making up a fat parcel for Ham's long-suffering aunt in Milan containing everything that Dr. Lara Emrich has told you, including a copy of her unpublished paper on the harmful side effects of the drug Dypraxa, such as blurred vision, bleeding, blindness and death, also a note of Markus Lorbeer's postbox number in Nairobi, and another describing what you intend should be your next move, in case you are impeded from taking it by forces outside your control. It is a moment of conscious, culpable, willful lapse, when the presence of a beautiful woman, another pariah like himself, standing at his shoulder and feeling his pulse with her kind fingers can be no excuse for failing to observe the basic principles of operational security.

"You shouldn't be seen with me," he objects lamely. "They know I'm around. I'll only make things worse for you."

"There is no worse," she retorts. "My negative situation is complete."

"Where's your car?"

"It is five minutes. Can you walk?"

It is a moment also when Justin in his state of physical exhaustion gratefully reverts to the excuses of good manners and ancient chivalry that were bred in him from his Etonian cradle. A single woman should be accompanied to her coach at night, should not be exposed to vagabonds, footpads and highwaymen. He stands. She puts a hand under his elbow and keeps it there as they tiptoe together across the drawing room to the stairs.

"'Night, children," Amy calls through a closed door. "Have fun now."

"You've been very kind," Justin replies.